Water balloons, rubber bands and gears from an old copier were among the items used Saturday to make complex inventions to perform a simple task at Union College.
The annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest drew 20 teams of students from 11 schools and a BOCES district to demonstrate their inventions for engineers from General Electric.
Goldberg was an engineer and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist whose name has become eponymous for anything that is unnecessarily complex or convoluted.
Union College professor James Hedrick oversaw the annual competition and said he was thrilled with the ingenuity displayed by the high school students.
“This is a simple task made complicated and the creativity these students have shown is amazing,” said Hedrick.
Students were invited in January to design and create a machine that could remove the top from a 20-ounce bottle of soda and fill a 16-ounce cup, preferably without spilling.
The team from Niskayuna High School won the competition.
Using outer space as its theme, the team decorated its display with aliens and planets. Team members added ice and a drinking straw to the final product in an effort to impress the judges, according to ninth-grader Michael Fusella.
Strings and rubber bands moved rods that threw switches to electrify a drill. The drill twisted off the bottle top and tipped the bottle toward a funnel as ice was released down a shoot on one side.
The liquid was pumped through a tube into the cup in the middle after the ice landed. Niskayuna technology teacher Jack Gribben said the students met about once a week as a team and often came in smaller groups as time allowed to work on the invention.
Michael Ross of Queensbury said his team, from the BOCES center in Hudson Falls, also had members from South Glens Falls, Argyle and Lake George.
Plastic pirates manned a pair of small boats as adventure on the high seas served as the team's theme for the competition.
Hedrick narrated as toy pirates named Willy, Jack, Phil and Captain Elmer were hanged, thrown into a lifeboat, pushed off a plank and tossed from the crow's nest, causing switches to be thrown, a cannon to be triggered, a motor to twist the bottle cap and a lever to tip the bottle, filling the cup. The grand finale came when a skull and crossbones flag was raised. “We had a lot of fun brainstorming and then making it.”